be there on Sunday, 1 Sept at 7pm (CEST) when the new lyrikline will be going online! We cordially invite you to celebrate with us and watch the event live stream on www.lyrikline.org. Heiko Strunk, the lyrikline project manager, will give us a tour of the relaunched website and all its new features and functions, we will link to partners in Nigeria, Russia and Slovenia via video, publish many new poets on the site and we will have six great lyrikline poets on stage, two of them to be published on the relaunch day:

You are invited not only to watch the event but to comment on facebook, on twitter (seems #llrelaunch is a suitable hashtag) and hopefully (still working on making this possible) also chat with us and some of the poets of the event.
The event physically takes place at ‘c-base – ›Raumstation unter Berlin Mitte‹ (Space station beneath Berlin-Mitte)’, a friendly place for IT and open source people, who kindly took us in. The languages of the event will be English and German mainly, but we’ll hear a bit of Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Norwegian and Finnish too.

See you on Sunday!

We’re excited…

The relaunch of the website has been made possible by a grant from the German Lottery Foundation, Berlin.
The event is taking place with the kind support of: c-base, Institut Ramon Llull, Royal Norwegian Embassy Berlin, Rámus Förlag, Malmö and the Swedish Embassy

My studio is an unstable, expanding and contracting space that completely alters its shape depending on the stage and nature of a poem. Sometimes the entire room becomes an architecture of notes, drafts, folders, CDs and piles of books – a vertical chaos, perfectly ordered through the process of making. In the latter stages of a poem, the pages and books progressively disappear and my computer’s various text and sound software programmes become the primary places of writing. This ‘place of poetry’ embraces multiple spaces of change, renewal and abandonment. And for me, as for many writers, the first moment of the next poem can start anywhere – poiesis is omnipresent and the place we write is everywhere.

I have a house-mate who keeps his room but is out of LA for most of the year. Sometimes I use the desk there, just for variety, or a change of mood or scenery. You can see the palm trees out the window in this photo – a very LA sight. Also in summer, when the days get very hot, it’s cooler on that side of the house in the afternoons. The desk is made of steel, and there’s nothing on it at all; I carry in there whatever I need for that day’s work.

photo: Luke Davies

The more cluttered desk is the one I mostly use. It’s actually also in my bedroom. So obviously I spend a lot of time in the bedroom! But it’s a big room, with great light and air-flow, and outside one of the windows there’s a nice tree which hummingbirds flit in and out of all day long.

“This is forceful poetry that lives up to its title, showing violence, damage, anxiety: seismic tremors of personal, cultural and global dimensions”, said the jury of the Mary Gilmore Poetry Prize when they awarded the prize for her book Knuckled to our latest poet.

These seismic tremors come from Australia and are written by the poet behind Advent Calendar door 9

Fiona Wright was born in 1983 and belongs to a generation of exceptionally talented young Australian women poets. The distinguishing characteristic of her poetry is a social sense, of families and people in a particular place and time.

Poetry is no more or less important than other arts. It is, however, the most personal and, since it depends so much on language, the art in which cultural particularities are most clearly heard (even if at lower volume in translation). The satisfaction is, as William Carlos Williams said, in creating “a small machine made of words”, a mechanism which works for others but is also unique to its creator. The best of these machines will sometimes still work in future generations.Geoff Page, Australia

lyrikline, for me, represents one of the most profound and important developments in the history of the dissemination and distribution of poetry. The design of the site is so smart, methodical and elegant. Anybody in the world with access to the internet can instantly connect with the work of hundreds of international poets, see their work and simultaneously hear them read it. One can also immediately experience poems in translation in many different languages which illuminates some of the cultural complexities of ‘intranslatability’ which are so relevant to our time. lyrikline creates an intimate, multi-layered, critical dreaming space for experiencing poetic process.

Congratulations and thanks to the staff of Literaturwerkstatt Berlin for the many innovative, visionary projects you have created and for your passionate commitment to representing and fostering all forms of poetry.